During his time in Los Angeles, Olney had what was apparently his first and only romantic relationship. His frequent letters to family members back east report his having met a twenty-four-year-old stenographer and would-be painter named Bettina Hirsch, whom he described as “a beautiful, talented, and educated woman who, like me, finds herself at odds with the world.” There was even talk of marriage, before Hirsch apparently took her own life on Christmas day in 1920. Her body was discovered by a roommate, after she used a straight razor to open both her wrists. The degree to which Olney was affected by his girlfriend’s death is evident in a number of surviving poems and letters he wrote at this time, and in the fact that it abruptly ended his infatuation with California.
There’s a handwritten notation in the right margin here, beside the above paragraph. I’m pausing to mention this if only because, all in all, Harvey’s typescript is surprisingly clean and generally free of such marks. The note reads, simply, “No death certificate on file w/LA Co. Office of Coroner.” I assume this means that Harvey made an inquiry himself, though I suppose it’s possible he learned of the missing death certificate from another source. At any rate, he continues:
He [Olney] returned to New England in 1921, having, with the help of a maternal aunt, managed to find employment as an office clerk for the Ocean State Stone and Monument Company, then operating the granite quarry which would, decades later, flood and become known as Ramswool Pond. And it is at this point that his involvement with the “Red Tree” begins. Joseph Olney was living in a rooming house in Moosup Valley when he heard tales of the locally infamous tree from coworkers. He appears to have first visited it himself just after Easter in ’21, and, thereafter, returned to the site almost weekly; he also began collecting and writing down the history and folklore associated with the tree and the strange occurrences on the Wight Farm. Many of his papers are deposited in the collection of the Foster Preservation Society, and I have had the opportunity to read most of them. To his credit, Olney carefully interviewed dozens of residents of Moosup Valley, Coventry, Vaughn Hollow, et al., regarding the oak, using techniques not dissimilar from those now employed by professional anthropologists and folklorists. He speaks, in his journal, of desiring to write a book detailing the history of the tree, and, here, his mood seems generally upbeat, despite the fact that he must still have been mourning the loss of Bettina Hirsch. There is evidence that he may even have written query letters to publishers in Manhattan, gauging the potential interest in such a volume.
Then, during the summer of 1921, his disposition suddenly changes, and his writings on the tree become darker and less organized. This period seems to have been triggered by a series of nightmares wherein he encountered the “ghost of my dear lost Bettina” at the tree and “in which she led me beneath the rind of the earth, into a fantastic and moldering rat’s maze of catacombs accessed by a secret doorway below the Indian altar stone.” Olney wrote of witnessing “grisly, unspeakable acts performed underground by demonic beings, and, somehow, Bettina was a willing party to it all, and she wished nothing so much as to initiate me into that ghoulish clique.” Still, he continued his research, and his visits to the tree, though it was noted that his work had begun to suffer, and his supervisors complained that he “seemed always distracted, his mind rarely on the job.” Fortunately, most of Olney’s research and writings on the tree are extant (having been seized as evidence for the prosecution).
Though I will not here detour into the grisly details of each murder that Joseph Fearing Olney is alleged to have committed beginning in May of 1922, I will provide a brief summation, as the case has received so little attention. It is important to note that less than one month before the date of the first murder, Olney purchased a used 1915 Model T Ford from a farmer on Cucumber Hill Road, having borrowed $175 from a relative. The automobile would allow him the freedom of movement needed (so the State would argue) to seek his victims from towns a safe distance from his room in Moosup Valley. Olney, it seems, killed by the maxim “Don’t shit where you eat.”
On Saturday, May 14th, a seventeen-year-old girl named Ellen Whitford vanished from her home in Tuckertown, west of Peace Dale. Four days later, fishermen discovered her mutilated and decapitated body floating in the Saugatucket River. A scar allowed the girl’s parents to identify the nude body. The next headless corpse was also found in the Saugatucket, only two weeks later, on May 29th, however this one remained unidentified for several months, until the woman was determined to have been a mill worker from Peace Dale. A third body was found on Saturday, June 17th, caught in a logjam on a bend of the Chipuxet River, east of Kingston Station, just north of the Great Swamp. By this time, newspapers as far away as Boston and New York were carrying stories of “the Rhode Island headhunter,” and after the discovery of the fourth victim — Siobhan Mary Dunlevy, also a Peace Dale mill worker, also found in the Chipuxet River — the killings (or at least the discovery of corpses) halted until the fifth body turned up in September. The badly decomposed remains of twenty-three-year-old Mary Wojtowicz, the daughter of Polish immigrants, was discovered in the weeds at the northern end of Saugatucket Pond. Identification was facilitated by a birthmark on the woman’s left ankle.
For almost a year no additional bodies were discovered, and we know from Olney’s journals, that he killed no one else until the next spring, when “the South County ripper” resumed his activities on the anniversary of the death of Ellen Whitford. Between May and August, six bodies were found, all decapitated and having suffered other mutilations, all of the victims women between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one, and all but one of them mill workers. In each instance, the bodies had been dumped into a river or pond after the murder, and none were found nearer to the rooming house in Moosup Valley where Olney was still living than that of Joanne Leslie Smith, recovered from the Wood River near Barberville, a good fifteen miles to the southeast. At summer’s end, the waterways of southern Rhode Island once more stopped yielding these gruesome revelations.
I will pause here in my catalog of Olney’s victims to discuss his journals, which more than his suicide, surely stand as undeniable proof of his guilt. The man was exacting in his description of every one of the murders he perpetrated, describing such details as the time of day each girl was killed, the weather, the clothes she was wearing, and the place where he disposed of the body. Every victim’s name was provided, which, in many cases, allowed identifications that might otherwise have been impossible, given advanced decay and/or mutilation. In most cases, Joseph Olney even recorded snippets of his conversations with the victims, and graphic particulars of each death. However, what is most interesting to the problem of the “red tree” are the passages he wrote seeking to explain, to himself, his motives in these crimes, and what psychologists would now refer to as his “delusional architecture.”